The Invitation

Truly tense and suspenseful. Fascinating premise. Psychologically and culturally rich.



(I had a choice between two bad trailers – one that gives too much away and one that leaves you with almost no sense of what the movie’s about. I went with the latter.)

COWSPIRACY

Now on Netflix:

Historical quote of the day – those who don’t seek to be masters

“I must lose in a world where only the winner is a Man, a human being. I was not a real Man. I was a queer, a half-Man, a pseudo-Man, like a woman…. Men fought and won, they fought other men for the ownership of the rest of creation, lesser peoples, the losers, women, the Third World, as well as the natural environment. I could never be a real Man.

We must not give up our humanity to become like the Man. We must not seek to conquer, to become the master. Our gayness, our ability to love one another, is our humanity, and it must not be sold for the Man’s mastery over others. And if the straight Man’s revolution is based on mastery and conquest we will have no part in it. But we are going to make a gay revolution, a revolution that will be an assertion of humanity. And remembering what you taught us of our humanity, we gay men, together with women, and all the other victims, those who don’t seek to be masters, can create it.”

- Mike Silverstein, “An Open Letter to Tennessee Williams,” Gay Sunshine, October 1971, quoted in Mark Grief, The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933-1973 (2015)

Quote of the day – almost unbearable

“We arrived at midnight on Tuesday and stayed until 3am. I have been at protests which started at 5am, but this was my first that started at midnight, and I was so comforted by the activists who came to be there at such an odd and early hour. We stationed ourselves in a spot where the truck would have to stop at the red light that is actually on a busy highway, but it is quieter at this hour.

We were able to rush to the side of the truck to be near the chickens. Although to avoid us, one truck driver drove through the red light.

Every truck was different as was the placement of the chickens in the crates—some facing us, some not. But one, who I can still see, was a small chicken lying on her side facing me. I could see her baby blue eye and her exhausted face staring back at me, blinking. She was on her side and looked like she was being crushed.

This is where bearing witness becomes almost unbearable. Watching her look at me and not being able to get her out is one of those situations where you fear losing your sanity because you lack the ability to do anything, much less comprehend why this gentle little bird was about to smell death, experience even more fear, and of course, die herself.

As I sit here now, my heart hurts and my eyes burn from the idea that she was probably gone within hours of me seeing her along with so many like her—thousands of them. The image of her will forever be in my heart and mind.

And all I can tell myself is that at least I was able to tell her (and all of them) how sorry I was and that I loved her. Which I repeated over and over…”

- “Bearing Witness”

So cute

Even better, I saw this, with other touchingly cute pictures, in a story about a California couple who have become vegans and started an animal sanctuary, and are converting their goat’s milk cheese business into a vegan cheese business.

Quote of the day

“If realized in Honduras, charter cities will be founded on mass land theft, violation of human rights, and repression and criminalization of popular movements fighting to defend their communities.”

- Heather Gies

The Honduras Solidarity Network, Food First, and other US organizations and activists in solidarity with the people of Honduras will be protesting the neoliberal event “FREE TO CHOOSE CITIES: New Opportunities for Enterprise & Governance in Honduras and Beyond” in San Francisco tomorrow (Monday, June 8, 2015).

The organizers of the charter cities event are familiar names from the US and Latin American rightwing network. Kind of an inauspicious moment for such a meeting. The Honduran “president” has decided to send a representative rather than appear in person.

You can read the interesting analysis of OFRANEH (Organización Fraternal Negra Hondureña, the federation of Honduran indigenous peoples’ organizations) in Spanish here.

...Ciertamente en Honduras se vive un caos inducido, que ha colocado a la democracia al borde del abismo. Recientemente la Organización Mundial de la Salud señaló un promedio de 102 asesinatos por cada cien mil habitantes, cifra que lo califica como el mas violento del planeta. La impunidad alcanza al 95% de los homicidios, y el debacle causado por el saqueo de instituciones estatales ha destruido el sistema de salud nacional.

No obstante la solución que pretende un grupúsculo de políticos y empresarios de rematar zonas del país al capital extranjero, donde se les permitirá una tabula rasa jurídica, es un simple negocio de la elite de poder, que dará lugar a islas de afluencia circundadas por un mar de pobreza y violencia. El fracaso de Honduras esta relacionado directamente con la condición de piratas de aquellos que han ejercido el poder y se han asociado con el narcotráfico en las ultimas décadas, permitiendo el colapso del sistema jurídico y la putrefacción de las fuerzas de seguridad.

Mientras en San Francisco se planifican las nuevas formas de gobernanza para Honduras, en la isla de Zacate Grande, golfo de Fonseca, se ha declarado un toque de queda; casualmente en un paraje vecino a donde pretenden los libertarios colocar en un inicio sus plataformas flotantes....

Cowspiracy directors Kip Anderson and Keegan Kuhn on Democracy Now!

“[N]o matter what issue you care about, whether it’s ocean dead zones, species extinction, habitat destruction, rain forest [destruction], literally the list goes on and on, animal agriculture is at the forefront of the issue. Why aren’t these organizations talking about it?” - Keegan Kuhn

Read or watch the interview here, or watch below:



You can watch Cowspiracy online for a small donation at the film site. I haven’t yet, but plan to soon.

There’s only one Santa Barbara shooter

Peter Sutcliffe was always different, but not by a wide margin: the world is full of men who beat their wives, destroy their self-respect, treat them like dirt. They do it because they hate and despise women, because they are disgusted by them, because they need to prove to themselves and to their friends that they are real men. Occasionally, for one in a million, it isn’t enough. Peter Sutcliffe was one of those. But when the trees are so dense, who can with certainty pick out the really rotten timber?

This is from the concluding paragraph of the chapter of Joan Smith’s 1989 Misogynies*



titled “There’s Only One Yorkshire Ripper.” In it, she analyzes, in the context of societal misogyny, the police investigation into the string of murders and attempted murders of women carried out by Peter Sutcliffe in northern England in the late 1970s. In the preface to the 2013 edition, Smith describes how these events originally provided the impetus for the book:

The murders seemed to me a pure manifestation of misogyny, the consequence in one disturbed individual of the suspicion and dislike for women which I saw all around me. Peter Sutcliffe’s hatred of women was extreme but it wasn’t unique, which was one of the reasons why the police had such trouble catching him. They thought he would stand out and I thought exactly the opposite: that he could hide quite easily in a culture which often displayed casual contempt for women. It later emerged that Sutcliffe had been interviewed ten times without ever becoming a serious suspect.

It seems relevant in light of the recent killings in Santa Barbara.

* I don’t endorse every argument in this book, but I do recommend it.

Brave Genius 3: a study in contrasts

Looking again over the articles I mentioned last night, I clicked on a link to a letter from a Berkeley math lecturer, Alexander Coward, to his students explaining why he would be crossing picket lines to teach his class. It makes for an even better contrast with Jacques Monod.

The letter has gone viral and received a good deal of praise. It would be funny (and sad) in any context, if only for its presentation of political stupidity and ignorance as insight and sophistication:

Whatever the alleged injustices are that are being protested about tomorrow, it is clear that you are not responsible for those things, whatever they are, and I do not think you should be denied an education[! - SC] because of someone else’s fight that you are not responsible for….

…Beyond practical matters, I think it’s also worth reflecting a little on the broader relationship between politics and your education, and I think I have some important things to share on this topic that may be helpful to you.

…If I’ve learned one thing about politics since I was your age, it is this: Politics, like most things in life worth thinking about, including mathematics, is very big, very complicated, and very interconnected. I’ve lived and worked in four countries on four continents, all with societies set up differently both politically and socially. I’ve discovered that there is no unique or obviously best way of setting up society. For every decision and judgement you reach, there are people who benefit and people who lose out.

How true. Fascism, democracy, Sweden, Afghanistan,... – just different ways of doing things, winners and losers in each, no point in opposing any one system or fighting for another. It’s all frightfully complicated, and who’s to say what’s better or worse? Who are we to claim that it’s better when workers receive decent pay and benefits and are treated with respect, or that this is a human right worth fighting for?

As responses have noted, Coward’s own working conditions and the students’ access to affordable public education (as well as the fact that they have the choice to speak out about political issues on campus) are the result of previous struggles and acts of solidarity. But no matter to Coward. He encourages students to put all of their focus on their education (which he defines to exclude participation in social justice movements, apparently):

And do not fall into the trap of thinking that you focusing on your education is a selfish thing. It’s not a selfish thing. It’s the most noble thing you could do.

Society is investing in you so that you can help solve the many challenges we are going to face in the coming decades, from profound technological challenges to helping people with the age old search for human happiness and meaning.

He could ask these scientists how people’s focusing on their own education and work panned out.

But what struck me most was the contrast between Coward and Jacques Monod, whose actions are described in Brave Genius. Monod delayed and interrupted his scientific work repeatedly to involve himself in social causes: to lead Resistance struggles, for example, to help Agnès Ullmann and Tamás Erdös escape from Communist Hungary, to support the student uprisings of ‘68,… It didn’t stop him from Nobel-worthy work, but it easily could have – he risked his life many times. Completely foreign to him was the idea that scientists or students were a special category of elites who were excused from struggles to end oppression and exploitation because of need to dedicate themselves to intellectual pursuits for the hypothetical good of future society, or that this was a noble path. What a difference from people like Coward.

I can’t wait to try this cheese.

I came across a link the other day to an article in Food & Wine about “the science and craft behind” Kite Hill’s artisanal vegan cheeses. They’ve been created by a team of culinary and scientific experts which includes biochemist and PLoS cofounder Patrick Brown, as part of his project of “trying to the maximum extent possible to eliminate animal farming on the planet Earth.”

Apparently, they're sold exclusively at Whole Foods, and for the time being only on or near the West coast (and one store in OK), but the site claims that they'll be available at Whole Foods nationwide within months. Can’t wait to try them.

Amazon UK stops selling foie gras

In great news, Amazon UK has decided to stop selling foie gras through its web site. Now it’s time for the US Amazon to follow suit. I found it interesting that the Amazon campaign framed the issue in terms of national identity, with the cruelty involved characterized as “very un-British.” As things progress, I think we’ll see more such campaigns linking local, regional, or national identities to the rejection of exploitation and cruelty. This is a positive development insofar as it doesn’t shade into racism and xenophobia, which is always a danger. I’ll probably have more to say about it in the future.

When I was posting last year about California’s foie gras ban, I was astonished to learn that some chefs and restaurants were going out of their way to oppose and get around the law. Is this really the battle they want to take on, I wondered? Promoting the torture of ducks and geese so rich people can eat their livers? The extent of callousness toward the animals’ suffering was made plain in one recent quotation. Marcus Henley, operations manager of Hudson Valley farm in New York, responded to a federal appeals court’s ruling upholding the California ban last month: “This isn't like fireworks; nobody is being harmed by foie gras.”

I was also…I’ll call it amused at the time to read of a French politician calling for a boycott of Californian wines in response to the foie gras ban. It’s not generally a great idea to try to strike a blow by boycotting products for which the import-export balance weighs heavily in your favor. What are they going to boycott next – couture? arrogance? sexism? (I kid, I kid.)

Now the French government is objecting to Amazon UK’s decision. Guillaume Garot, the French agribusiness minister, remarked, “I defend this sector because of jobs but also because of a certain idea of gastronomic heritage.” Yes, well, some traditions need to die. How French is cruelty?

$2 million, please.

"We Talk To The Philosopher Who Will Receive $5 Million To Study Immortality":

...We’ll look at near death experiences both in western cultures and throughout the world and really look at what they’re all about and ask the question — do they indicate something about an afterlife...?

No.

...But then there’s a lot of analytical work where we can ask philosophical questions about the meaning of the experiences. Do they indicate glimpses of an afterlife

No.

...or are they delusions?

Yes.

(As this is a subset of the "research questions," I'll settle for a mere $1 million.)

***

First I would say the Templeton Foundation is doing very important philanthropic work because they are stepping into a big void. There’s very little money for the humanities provided by governments. Who else has the money and the interest to support these great questions of human interest? I might even say it’s inappropriate for governments to ask citizens to support this kind of research.

It's totally appropriate for a private foundation with a rightwing, religious agenda, though. What could go wrong?

Further I should say that in my experience [Fischer sits on the board of the Templeton Foundation] I have seen no pressure by Templeton to go in one direction or another or to tilt results.

LOL. Don't ever change, Templeton.

In three days, California will be a better place.

At long last, on July 1st, the state’s ban on foie gras will take effect. Appetite for Justice has the history behind the law, featuring a discussion of the risks and frustrations of working through legislative channels (and an adorable duck photo!).

The chefs who’ve fought this, hosting foie gras parties and the like, have dishonored themselves and their profession.